Gain

by Richard Powers

  Darwin had shown competition to be the engine by which species honed the various skills of existence. Competition had turned America, in the space of five generations, from homespun backwoodsman to the rival of European nations. Direct competition between brands within Clare could only serve to strengthen the firm in the most desirable manner: from the inside out.

  Clare was not so omniscient as to be able to tell which brand best suited every niche. Only the customer’s dollar ballot sufficed to describe the public’s desires. Competition between brands would keep the whole firm honest, attuned, listening.

  There was no fooling the market. One could no more protect a soap whose time had passed than one could keep one’s body from aging by holding one’s breath. If Native Balm were indeed vulnerable, better for it to give in to Snowdrop than to some ugly Colgate monstrosity. And Snowdrop would grow stronger by sounding out the weaknesses in Native Balm, as cheetahs grow faster when trained by the antelope.

  By century’s end, competitive progress had become Clare’s product. Business was the best way to betterment, and betterment was the best of businesses. Almost by accident, the company discovered the rewards of philanthropy. Julia’s will provided a lump sum for the seminary school where Ben had found his first chemical assistants. The Samuel and Resolve Clare bequest helped build public hospitals from Roxbury to Hyde Park.

  But Peter Clare hit upon the master stroke of beneficence while still alive. He dreamed up a way to attach the firm’s name permanently to improvement. Clare College in Fair Spring, Ohio, was founded in 1889 by a man whose education was limited to a series of bedside tutors. With each passing year, Clare College’s reputation for undergraduate education grew until there came a day when few people, even among those who went there, connected it with soap.

  Soap was but one milepost on the unwinding road to fulfillment. Everywhere, companies extended the limits of what people could do and desire. W. R. Grace, who’d made a fortune shipping bird excrement back to New York, was buying up the defaulting Peruvian government. Herbert Dow began to turn Midland’s underground sea of brine into bromides and chlorides. Coca-Cola, that “Wonderful Nerve and Brain Tonic,” promised to cure diseases ranging from poor eyesight to vocal cord lesions. The Negro Gold Dust Twins were cleaning up in Chicago for their white owners.

  Secret deals with the railroads allowed Standard Oil to force most of its competitors into mergers. Carnegie leveraged himself into a majority position in Homestead Steel. Two chemists in Spray, North Carolina, poured the sludge from a failed experiment into a stream, and up from the surprise bubbles of acetylene rose Union Carbide.

  And in Cincinnati, weathering every economic storm, Douglas’s enemy incarnate flourished. Douglas so frequently accused Procter and Gamble of industrial and intellectual theft that matters at last came to a head in a lawsuit that both parties lost: Procter lost the suit, but Clare received a settlement too small to cover its considerable legal costs.

  If anyone should have sued for infringement, it was God. Harley Procter had raided the Bible to name his new baby, Psalm 45, verse eight:

  All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.

  But the man who named his upstart from a stray sermon was not above advertising a cheat as a selling point. A batch stirred by accident twice as long as it should have been resulted in “the soap that floats.” Soap with too much air in it, Douglas grumbled to anyone who would listen. Who would want to pay money for extra air?

  The public did. For air was pure, and the public now bought into the pure air that the soapmakers made for them. Harley Procter hired a Yale professor of chemistry to come up with an absolutely scientific but totally meaningless measure of the uncombined alkali, carbonates, and mineral matter in Ivory: .56 percent by weight. Declaring these trace materials “foreign and unnecessary,” Harley arrived at the bizarre, slightly huckstering, but decidedly scientific claim that Ivory was “99 and 44/100 percent pure.”

  The claim drove Clare to play its Harvard card. Employing the bogus purity scale, a Cambridge chemist and friend of Neeland’s declared Snowdrop to be 99 and 51/100 percent pure. This was not a claim that even Hiram Nagel could now make. But his chemists assured him that ordinary precipitation always contained at least one percent foreign and unnecessary substances. So Hy settled for “Purer than the driven snow.”

  As the market for soap doubled and redoubled, smaller manufacturers dropped away. The public proved large enough for several large competitors, so long as growth let each one make every new bar of soap a little more efficiently than the last.

  Soap was the burden of civilization, as well as its measure. It took considerable daily industrial tonnage just to break even against soil on the scale that expanding enterprise introduced. Cleanliness had to progress, if only to match pace with the steady progression of grime.

  New soaps spilled forth to meet the country’s swelling diversity. Chinese coolies blasting their way through the Rockies required the vilest tar soap. Ladies in the Four Hundred needed something that barely licked at their skin. Clare planned a new mild face soap, a yellow soap for dishwashing, a naphtha laundry cake, and a strong medicinal bar. The smaller the distinction, the more significant. Soap for everyone: salves, tonics, and squeezable metal tubes.

  Its revenues now solid, the firm prepared to take its inevitable next step into young adulthood. A national firm, with national advertising, fighting national competitors, required nation-sized capital. There was but one place to secure the needed sums: America herself. In 1891, Peter, Douglas, their families, and associates took Clare public.

  None of the firm’s owners had the expertise to manage such a monstrous transformation. Peter consulted his younger brother, William, a fastidious and successful banker who had spurned the firm to spite his neglectful mother. With Julia long dead, William seized the opportune moment to return to the fold. The banker took the financial steps necessary to ensure an orderly conversion. And he took his own fee for the service in the form of new common stock.

  Clare’s initial public offering of 40,000 shares ran for five days. The coy brevity of the offer revealed the move to be little more than a first, strategic step. Despite its new junior partner, the company’s structure remained unchanged. At the end of the day, the newly reformulated public corporation sported a board made up of six Clares and five close business associates. The existing partners held on to the bulk of the equity and, with it, sufficient votes to carry just about any issue.

  And yet Clare now had shareholders. Slowly, over the years, their numbers swelled, each private citizen controlling an infinitesimal fraction of the whole operation. From California to Maine, many of Clare’s owners would die with a certificate in their attic lockbox, never having stepped foot in a Clare factory.

  This Certifies That

  Mrs. Dorothea Rowen

  is entitled to

  ONE HUNDRED SHARES

  of the COMMON STOCK

  of the Clare Soap and Chemical Company, Incorporated

  This certificate will not become valid until countersigned and registered by the Covenant Trust and Banking Company of Boston, Massachusetts. In Witness Whereof, the President and Secretary of said Company hereunto submit their signatures.

  She gives thanks for being alive.

  Not out loud, over the turkey and stuffing, Tim and Don’s impossible handiwork. But in a silent prayer, her moves a bit rusty, she does mouth her life’s unlikelihood. Thanks be for the lives of her children, for the shape of each of their lucky troubles. She even blesses the odd good moments with Don, today and in the past. She praises God for this dry and sheltering house, for the indelible album of years, now recovered and spread in front of her. She thinks some glad word for her asters and dianthus, her garden’s constant change taking place even now, under the cold ground.

  She gives thanks that she’s found the pain livable so far. This much she can stand. She’s still more
or less herself. She gives thanks that she has made it to November able to sit up at the table. She gives thanks that radiation is still an option, and thanks again that the next consult is not until after this holiday.

  Don says the grace, because he always used to. Because no one else will. “Thank you, Lord, for these, Your bountiful gifts, which we receive in a grateful spirit.”

  “And a special thanks to Butterball,” Tim adds. “How’d they figure out how to make an all-white-meat bird? And how did you ever do it?” he asks Laura. “I mean, you know. In the old days. Dad says you had to, like, baste and stuff?” Talkative with nerves, his voice flecked with the first note of admiration since he turned twelve.

  “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. The hardest part was catching the damn things.”

  Tim laughs, tentatively.

  Nobody quite knows what to do with this holiday anymore. Not a whole lot of talk about the escaped slave Squanto and his fish fertilizer these days. Even grade schools shy away from that first white harvest, now more suspect than celebrated. The Anglos with the buckles on their heads and the cone-shaped shotguns, a massive skeleton in the national closet. To Laura’s kids, Plymouth’s not even a car any longer.

  They all eat until they feel like Laura on day three after a treatment. Even Laura, whose taxol regimen, thanks or no, is over. They watch a football game that none of them cares about. They play Monopoly. Tim wipes them all out and opens a high-rise public housing project on Ventnor Ave. where his three pauperized blood relations can end their days.

  Except for a spate of profanity from Ellen, who drops a dish while trying to unload the dishwasher, the day goes by unblemished. And who can put up too many blemish-free days into store?

  On Monday, Laura goes in for calibration. The peritoneal phosphorus, the concentrated chemo washes are no longer options. They will dose her with fallout, every day, for twenty days or until she can’t take it. Whichever comes first.

  The first flush of fear takes root inside her gut. All this time, she has stayed brave: through the operation, the discovery, the roller coaster of drugs, the poisons that killed her immune system and deadened her feet so she cannot walk without stumbling. Through all this, she’s never once really been afraid.

  Now she is. Fear rolls over her like breakers. It pins her arms to her sides and chills her forehead. She shies from it like a crazed racehorse. She can understand fear, but not this involuntary spasm. Death seems no closer than it did last week. Then it dawns on her: the involuntary, learned panic. She’s terrified that twenty extended X-rays will give her cancer.

  The radiology team studies the scans. They set up the angles of incidence, map her body, mold the blocks, plot the rays, and focus their point of intersection with a precision Laura can’t really believe. Faith, like nausea, only gets harder with repeated practice.

  “Smart weapons,” the radiologist tells her. The radiologist is a girl who can’t be a day older than Ellen. She scribbles upon Laura’s abdomen with Magic Markers. Ritual scarification. Runways and hieroglyphs, landing signs for aliens.

  The prep takes longer than all the remaining treatments will. The actual first dose, her worst nightmare, is over in thirty seconds. Compared to the ordeal of the two-day drip, it seems a joke.

  “That’s it?” She giggles. “That’s it?”

  “One down.” The radiologist nods. “Nineteen to go.”

  Laura goes home. There, Ellen and Tim surprise her with an ad hoc Advent calendar to mark her progress. Twenty doors, one already sprung. How small the entire scene is: two folds of cardboard that fit nicely on the end table by the sofa in the living room. Only nineteen little doors still to go through. Who could help but survive that?

  Behind each flap the kids have pasted Instamatic snippets. The pictures poke through, taking the air like tenants on their balconies in the month’s apartment block. Tim blowing a trumpet. Ellen trying to skate. Each Osco print struggles from behind its cardboard portal, blurry squares of underexposed existence wanting a way out.

  The cardboard craftwork scalds her insides, worse than any rays. If any caustic can cure her, it will be this one. She will open all twenty doors, one after the other, and never look away. And by the end she will be healthy, well, clean. By the fifth little flap she is certain of it. No cancer in the world could survive such blasting.

  The tenth door reveals a shot of the three of them falling down on cross-country skis. By the time she opens it, she cannot balance, even upon bare feet. The woman whose pelvis scraped against the bath’s porcelain now begins to lose weight for real. Food no longer just repulses her. It becomes inconceivable. Even the canned weight-gain drinks marketed just for her will not go down.

  For all she has been through, she has not felt fatigue until now. If she tries to take a shower upon awakening, it wrecks her until midafternoon. What she thought was nausea turns out to be some silly warm-up. She lies in bed, slammed back against the pillows, pinned to them as if to the wall of a Tilt-A-Whirl. The carnival floor falls away, and she hangs, hurling in vacant space.

  The nausea is many times worse than when she was pregnant with Tim. Only one creature could account for such morning sickness. She carries a baby beyond bearing. And marks out its term on her Advent calendar.

  They load her with so many medications that it takes all her concentration just to manage the daily doses. Luckily for her, the pills are all different sizes and colors. She decides for herself what each one does, based on its appearance. Red stokes up and blue calms. On days when she feels okay, she worries that it might be just the drugs. Then she stops worrying, thanks to some other pill.

  Dr. Archer suggests that she stick with the mental exercises. They can’t hurt. Everything her doctors throw against the cancer needs the aid of her own immune system. And only attitude can boost that now, and only she can boost her attitude.

  She dutifully repeats the chants and cheers from her cancer tapes, when she has the strength. She says them like a mantra at 4 a.m., to make herself fall back asleep. My whole life is still in front of me. Each breath I take makes me stronger. The phrases pop into her head at odd hours during the day, the way she used to hum to herself, It’s the Real Thing, or Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick? She lips the words, long after she stops believing them. Just in case the syllables themselves might do some good, all on their own.

  The night of treatment fifteen—she cannot remember what was behind that day’s door—she wakes herself up, repeating in a blind frenzy, “My whole life is still in front of me.” Twisting in darkness, all at once she washes up on an island of respite.

  The night is traitless and without motion. She strains and can hear nothing: no traffic, no radios. Even the churn of life support, the air’s constant generators and compressors falter from the standing background noise and go mute. The world has been evacuated, or her relaxation exercises have at last halted it.

  She lies on the rocking tide of silence. There will be no more sleep tonight. Light, she hugs the mattress, throwing her favorite visualizations against the ceiling’s theater screen. She has gotten good at them, now that she knows what she needs to see. Her colors are all true and her resolution infinite.

  First she watches Ellen graduate from college. She summons up a commencement bulletin, complete with college seal. She follows Ellen to New York, to some kind of Fortune 500 office, where her job is to be manic and entertain international visitors.

  Then she watches Tim, still apparently living at home, buy his high-school GED with a portion of his first million-dollar Microsoft contract. Laura herself seems to be sitting up in life’s box seats, just laughing. The mere fact of her laughter surely means that she’s clean. The scenes even come with their own upbeat sound track, music from who knows where. Maybe even her own composition.

  She wants to make it. She’s gotten into the habit of existing. She likes being here. She doesn’t know what else she would do. Half of ovarian cancer patients can get cured. Half’s a good number. No reas
on why she can’t be in that half. Life is so endless, so anything. Limitless, the memories still lying in wait for her. And she knows this place where she can get a second set of prints for free.

  Her fantasy shots pull back. They reformulate, resort to the movie metaphors that the how-to books recommend. Her grandfather pulling angry black stones out of his four hundred acres with a lever and sledge, leaving it clean for plowing. Her dad in the south of Belgium, chasing Nazi stormtumors out of hiding with a flamethrower. Her mom as a healthy, 1950s TV bobby-soxer, finding some spidery blob-creature growing in her garage and using the local college scientist’s ray to purge it. She and Don as twenty-two-year-olds at the county fair, knocking over milk bottles marked with the letters C-A-N-C-E-R.

  She drifts without effort to her favorite. Old reliable. The clip that always makes her feel that she is doing the greatest good for the war being fought inside her. It seems to apply, even now that she has gone from chemicals to irradiation.

  First, her organs present themselves as rubbery pink cartoons, her hat-tip to the graphics in old school health movies: Our Friend the Abdomen. Somehow, this pretty, pink zinnia color gets tarnished. It grows speckled all over, like the bottom of neglected Revere Ware.

  Then she releases a horde of animated rug cleaners, plaque fighters, scrubbing bubbles, those enzymes that come on like bug-eyed brushes, chasing the world’s deviate growths down the kitchen drain. This crack regiment of mixed specialists goes over and over her cartoon insides, washing, tumbling, coursing through all her organs’ nooks and crannies, until it leaves every internal surface with that see-yourself shine.

  Behind door 20, a family celebrates. She looks and looks, but cannot say where they are. It seems to be a holiday, but not one that she has ever lived through. But she is there, happy, with her children wrapped in colored streamers. By the time she opens that last countdown marker, her body has become a little Nagasaki. Her skin is a field of second-degree flash burns. She cannot brush her teeth without needing a transfusion. She sleeps on the living-room sofa bed, the stairs impossible.